You're missing the parts where:

1: Roblox hosts your multiplayer gameservers in its pops for free, with a generous amount of free persistent storage and memory

1.a: Roblox handles scaling and SRE work for you for free - you're not going to be able to support millions of concurrent users yourself at that price point

2: when people buy robux on their phone the app store takes 20-30% of the dollar - but the player still gets 1 robux for each penny.

2.a: your game immediately is playable on iOS, android, PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, questvr, etc etc - no fees for you to get this distribution.

3: Roblox pays out creator rewards - a redistribution of revenue - to experiences that reengage dormant users or are played by paying users even if your game itself has no purchasable items.

Roblox's economic model has a redistributive nature that isn't common in other economies. If you're just looking at the devex rate and not building on the platform you wouldn't immediately appreciate it.

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Retric 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

None of what you said counters anything in my post.

> Roblox hosts your multiplayer gameservers in its pops for free > free > no fees

A middleman that takes a huge cut isn’t doing anything for free. Can you at least try and have an honest discussion here.

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fragmede 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

72% cut's still pretty steep for all that. Like, these aren't large corporations Roblox is working with, it's kids. It's their platform, and they get to charge whatever they want, and kids can choose not to use it, but 72% still seems exploitative to me. Not a parent tho.

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WaxProlix 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Post-appstore cut it's 42%, which is high but doesn't seem crazy. The unsuccessful attempts and idle piddling all need to be subsidized to allow the successes to exist in the first place, and I suspect we all know better than to undercount cloud, hosting, SRE, and staffing costs. They're all ongoing and pretty painful, and getting a shot at creating something with effectively zero downside risk (vs making a game in Godot and building/buying all of the other parts yourself or with staff) will always come with a lower upside.

	▲	Retric 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Post-appstore cut it's 42% That’s ~60% of the post AppStore cut or 42% of the total. If they took 42% of what remained developers would be getting more money than them. Further there’s no App Store cut when people buy this stuff on PC. The platform is ridiculously exploitive.